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Beyond the Myth: The Bounteous Mekong

By Jeff Opperman January 2, 2013 11:41 amJanuary 2, 2013 11:41 am

Photo

Fishermen hurling nets along the banks of the Mekong in northern Laos.Credit Jeff Opperman

Seventy-two hours after leaving Cleveland, I slipped away from Christmas Eve dinner with my family, walked down a dimly lighted path and crossed a rickety bamboo bridge to an island. I knelt down and dipped my hand into the Mekong River.

Actually, in the dark I misjudged the distance to the water’s surface and wound up putting my arm in up to the elbow. It felt like … warm water. As if I’d stuck my arm into my son’s aquarium back home, 10,000 miles away.

Party music thumped from the hotel across the river, with a spotlight dancing through the dark tropical sky. It wasn’t quite the Mekong but rather the Kok River, one of its tributaries in northern Thailand.

Dramatic beginnings aside, I was grateful to finally be in the Mekong’s basin.
Grateful to have completed multiday air travel with two children, of course, but beyond that I felt a huge rush of relief that our trip was still on track. We almost hadn’t made it out of Cleveland, where we live. The day of our departure, a storm named Draco bore down on northeastern Ohio. We’re quite used to winter storms, but I can’t remember one that had a name, let alone the name of a villain.

Our departure plane couldn’t land in Cleveland’s airport and had been rerouted to Detroit. The jet bridge jutted vacantly into the driving snow, and months of planning and commitments — with a tight time line of flights, guides and boats for our three-week journey here — seemed in jeopardy.

The plane eventually made it to Cleveland, and we took off only three and a half hours late. Four flights and three days later we arrived in Chiang Rai, Thailand, on the banks of the Kok.

Until tonight, the Mekong for me existed only in words and pictures, a mythical place, both culturally and biologically. It is the haunted river of the movie “Apocalypse Now” and legendary for its aquatic life – unsurpassed in the staggering dimensions of its megafish and tons of its fish harvest, and surpassed only by the Amazon for its diversity of fish species.

The Mekong is also the site of the planet’s most contentious debate about the future of great rivers.

Its fish harvest provides the primary source of protein for at least 50 million people and jobs for millions spread across the region’s rural villages. But several of the lower-basin countries, particularly Laos and Cambodia, are very poor. Nearly one-third of the people in the region lack sanitation, and in Laos, half of the rural population lacks electricity.

Although the percentage of people in the region living in poverty has declined considerably in the last two decades, the Mekong’s countries still have rapidly growing and urbanizing populations, and energy is needed to drive those cities and economic development.

The region’s governments are now looking to the Mekong as a key source of that needed power. A total of 11 hydroelectric dams are proposed or planned for the main-stem river, and this has set off a fierce debate over the river’s future.

The Mekong River Commission recently released a report highlighting the various benefits and costs of building these dams. (The commission, which includes representatives of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, is a forum for dialogue and research but has no decision-making authority.)

The report estimated that full construction of the dams would meet 6 to 8 percent of the region’s projected energy demand in 2025 and, although there are questions about the distribution of economic benefits, Laos in particular would see a substantial increase in its gross domestic product.

But this energy would come at a price. The dams will hinder or block the migration of fish, and because most of the important species migrate long distances to spawn, fish harvests could decline by nearly half; proposed dams on tributaries would cut harvests further. Laos and Cambodia could lose one-third of their protein supplies.

These are the statistics that have defined the Mekong for me as I prepared for the trip. Standing on the banks of the Kok, I knew I could finally begin to complement my reading with actual experience.

I’m a river scientist with the Nature Conservancy, part of a team that collaborates with governments, communities and companies to develop solutions for more environmentally sustainable river management. Yet I can’t pretend that I’m on this trip to offer answers to the Mekong’s tangled challenges. There’s far too much to learn, far too much complexity, and the region is full of experts and organizations that have committed decades to finding solutions for the Mekong.

At least I could offer some solutions for my children’s Christmas. After dinner, they collapsed in exhaustion, and my wife, Paola, had since also fallen asleep. So, like Santa, I reached deep into my pack and retrieved two stockings, some very small gifts and one short strand of Christmas lights. I dragged a potted plant in from the corridor, draped it with lights, and fell asleep.

Still jet-lagged, we all woke before dawn, and the children opened their gifts in front of the glowing plant, a tropical version of Charlie Brown’s sorry little Christmas tree.

After breakfast, we left Chiang Rai and took a bus north for Chiang Khong, on the banks of the Mekong. There we crossed the river into Laos and boarded a boat for a three-day trip down to Luang Prabang, the home of Laos’ recently extinguished monarchy and the center for Buddhism in Laos.

On its way to Luang Prabang, the Mekong winds through remote gorges flanked by steep and lush mountains. When I could put aside my analytical filters, I just soaked in the experience as someone who loves rivers. We motored unhurriedly through an idyllic tricolored world — brown river, green mountains, blue sky.

But my brain continually cut in on the dreamlike slow dance down the river. This was just our introduction, but the major elements of controversy over the Mekong’s future were already obvious: the river was an organic machine for producing food, flowing through a region that clearly needed development and improved living standards.

On first glance, the boat floated through a verdant near-wilderness. On closer inspection, the Mekong and its banks were more like an unruly linear farm. For nearly the entire length of our trip, the river was producing food.

Bamboo poles were jammed into rock crevices at various angles, securing nets just below the surface to strain fish from the fast currents. In eddies and still water, curving lines of floating plastic bottles functioned as buoys marking drift nets. Slender green bamboo sticks lined the water’s edge like a skinny forest, each one holding a small fish trap or baited hook. Along the beaches, men coiled their bodies and then heaved nets that hit the surface like circular spider webs.

This is the dry season, and the river has been dropping for months, exposing sand bars and moist banks. The banks have been planted in corn and green beans, with peanuts planted on the sand bars. Highest on the bars, where the peanut plants were oldest, they grew in a thick emerald carpet. Moving down the bars was a series of sequentially younger bands. The lowest band, land the river had most recently vacated, was a grid of newly planted seedlings.

We slept in villages both nights. Power lines had reached the first village just two years ago, while the second still lacked electricity. The roads between the villages could only be used during the dry season.

Over dinner the first night, we talked with the village headman, who was hosting us in his house. The topic of the proposed dams came up; the two proposed dams that would be farthest upstream are within the stretch of river we were traveling.

He said his main concerns were about the movement of fish and boats up and down the river, but that he had heard that the dams would be built to allow passage of both. He seemed confident that this was true.

“Roads, bridges, electricity, dams, clinics — all of these, we need all of these,” he said as he gestured at the dirt streets around us, the darkness pushed back by only a handful of light bulbs.

I thought back to the moment two nights earlier when I reached down from the dark bank of the Kok to touch the river with my hand and inadvertently stuck my arm in up to my elbow. That seemed an apt metaphor. Even though I’m now deeper in than simply touching the surface, I still feel pretty much in the dark.

Jeff Opperman is a senior freshwater scientist with the Nature Conservancy.

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